Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday January 12, 2012 @06:35AM
from the climbing-to-the-top dept.

SharkLaser writes "Microsoft's Bing search engine has overtaken Yahoo for the first time. While both Bing, Yahoo and a bunch of meta-search engines like the privacy-oriented DuckDuckGo use Bing's back-end, it clearly shows Yahoo's declining market share. comScore has also released its search data for 2011 — overall, Bing gained 3.1% of market share while Yahoo lost 1.5% and Google lost 0.7%. Yahoo's new CEO Scott Thompson has lots of work to do."

I accidentally searched on ask.com the other day too (no, really, the library had the toolbar installed). when the results came up, I realized that the entire first page was sponsored ads, with only two 'search results' on the page being real results. BUT, the layout of the results was very much like google's. colors, layout, etc. Not sure how much of that's just defaulting to browser color scheme for links, but I don't think all of it is.

More than likely, his answer will be the same as his predecessor: "people don't go to Yahoo for search results: they go for the/experience/."

Or some equally inane marketing bullshit. Anyway, it's an interesting idea- I'll give them that. Google already has the market pretty well cornered on a search page that only does search, so Yahoo is trying to capture the "people who want a search page so cluttered with info you can barely locate the search bar" demographic. All joking aside, it is somewhat nice to

Nah, his answer will be people don't go to Yahoo for search results. Our toolbar changes their prefrences so they use Yahoo whether they want it or not. Install somthing like yahoo messenger and you will get all defaulted to all kind of Yahoo crap.

Actually I wouldn't call it marketing bullshit as the vast majority of my customers i find have that set as their start page. What I've found talking to them is that yahoo has taken the place of the morning paper for them, they check their mail, read the headlines, some check their horoscope or play one of the yahoo games before work. the funny part is how few know they can actually search on the same page. I have sat there and watched them go right past yahoo search at the top of the Yahoo page to type in

I interviewed a half dozen Yahoo employees while I worked for "another" search engine company. I asked them why they were leaving. Four of them said (basically) that it was because Yahoo doesn't care about engineers or ideas, just eyeballs and money. If your project doesn't show good numbers, no matter how much better the user experience might be if it was adopted, your project will languish or be canceled. One guy mentioned that his group's hardware was cast-

I wondered that too. And the funny thing is, if it's the case, it might work -- I didn't know that DuckDuckGo was powered by Bing and, now that I do, it changes the way I feel about them. All of a sudden they aren't the champions of freedom that I thought them to be.

I just went over to their site and searched around. No mention anywhere that they're Bing powered. They must know that if they do have ties to Bing and they try to hide it, it'll hurt their image.

I wonder if it is FUD. There's just one article I found about DuckDuckGo being Bing powered (because of the similar low placement of Libre-Office when you search for Open Source Office on DDG and Bing), but it doesn't have anything concrete, just 'what ifs' and 'maybes'. Does anybody have a more official announcement on the matter? Do we know if DDG get money from Bing for using their results?

Why are you calling me a moron when answering an AC? Besides, Microsoft hardly did anything evil. Both Apple and Google are being much more evil now a days. Gee, your OS comes with a browser so you don't need to ftp to some address you don't even know to get a browser. Outrageous!

Because you constantly switch your main account, and you probably use AC too.

I don't care about the browser coming with the OS thing, I care about the stuff that I bothered to post a month or two ago but can't be arsed repeating to you. The management culture in MS in the 90s was demonstrated as completely rotten, and Ballmer is still in charge. Nothing has changed apart from they have to watch their step more. Both MS and Intel have used their monopoly positions to try to scare their clients into not deali

Sorry, but no. Microsoft is still as of today essentially mugging people (both device makers and by extension their buyers) by charging for the FAT patents.

The damn patent consists essentially on converting "longfilename.txt" to "LONGFI~1.TXT" - behold the innovation! - and for that they are able to extort any organization that wants to work with their monopolist OS (which was in large part gained through shady deals with OEMs).

Sorry, but no. Microsoft is still as of today essentially mugging people (both device makers and by extension their buyers) by charging for the FAT patents.

The damn patent consists essentially on converting "longfilename.txt" to "LONGFI~1.TXT" - behold the innovation! - and for that they are able to extort any organization that wants to work with their monopolist OS (which was in large part gained through shady deals with OEMs).

And, of course, there is absolutely no alternative to using FAT or indeed Windows.

Dude that was 19 fucking 96, get a life, seriously. I doubt you'd even be able to find 10 people still there from that era and all the main guys have been gone the better part of a decade. And if you are delusional enough to think that Steve "Whatever Apple is doing make a half assed copy NOW" Ballmer is some Darth Vader type get some help, okay? you are a perfect example of treating corporations as ballclubs to cheer or boo like its pro wrestling, but newsflash, they're just companies. And everyone that wa

I've been a professional programmer for something like 12 years, and in that time I've spent the majority of my time working with Microsoft tools and systems. I still do, in fact. Before that, I was an MSCE engineer for about 3 years. I don't hate for the sake of hating, I just don't like Microsoft because, well, they've proven themselves untrustworthy time and time again. Maybe I'm a hypocrite, but Microsoft have left a bad taste in my mouth and it is going to take something extraordinary before I'll even

Thanks -- somebody else also pointed out the link that gets shown next to the search results (and it points to the same page you linked). I should have seen that.

I agree with your sentiment, they do deserve time to grow in to something bigger -- I wonder if they will ever have the resources to build their own index though. It looks like the decision to use Bing is purely technical/engineering (they need cheap search results and there aren't many places to get them -- I know from experience that the Google A

FB and google both have business models built around extensive tracking and profiling of users. It is their source of income, their purpose as companies. Google's whole search business is just a way to gather user data, as is facebook's social networking. You can expect them to invade your privacy - if they don't, they aren't doing their jobs right.

ixquick.com (or startpage.com) is a privacy oriented meta search engine that's been around a long time. Its current incarnation anonymously repackages google search results.
DuckDuckGo is pretty cool. But I don't like Bing's results as much; and also I've been using ixquick for a long time... you hear about duckduckgo a lot these days, but sadly rarely hear of ixquick/startpage.

DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! BOSS, embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing & Blekko. For any given search, there is usually a vertical search engine out there that does a better job at answering it than a general search engine. Our long-term goal is to get you information from that best source, ideally in instant answer form.

I used to employ Google for all kinds of web searches, but over the last few month's, I realized (by accident), that Bing's video search returns were better presented (but not necessarily more relevant) than Google's.

Particularly, I have come to love Bing's playing of the videos when the mouse is hovered over them. Google has nothing close! Google should watch out.

That's a great feature in Bing, actually. Especially if looking for more adult material. Another thing is that Google has really crapped their design lately. It relies heavily on javascript and they've gone and hidden the cached link in the side panel that opens when you hover it. It's slow and clumsy. Same thing happened to their image search. It's sad because Google always took pride in providing clear, useful interface, but not anymore. I guess they get more ad clicks by frustrating users who use the normal search.

I like the image search, too. I started using Bing when Google+ came out and every website wanted to have me report to Google through a javascript tied to google.com, but blocking google.com meant search became really lame, so I started using Bing and sandboxed Google into Chrome. I find Bing's results to be better on obscure searches where Gooogle hasn't had someone pick out the best result already, but for most searches Bing is not quite there, but it is getting there. On a side note, I had never used Chrome before, so in 2011 I contributed to the increase in users using Bing and Chrome, however, Firefox is still my regular browser and I use Google and Bing about equally.

I believe the way the cache links and hover to view a preview are now there like thatto so google can say it takes user action to get those to show up so google is not technically infringing copyright, the user is requesting it, etc. Kinda annoying really.

I've contributed as well, but unwittingly as a result of msn.com's misleading "Feature Story" links. Each link is not really an article, but rather a pre-canned Bing search. This sort of practice has got to be skewing results, since people who click these links did not necessarily intend to use Bing.

"I have come to love Bing's playing of the videos when the mouse is hovered over them."

If only Yahoo! News could incorporate that so the videos, that are always "no longer available", show that message instead of users having to wait through an advertisement and 12 cookies. Sadly, advertisements and cookies are the only 2 things that seem to work properly on Yahoo! any longer. IMHO of course.

Google's pulled a lot of dumb moves recently. It used to be that if you disabled instant search you could get your search bar back at the bottom of the search results page. Now it's just gone permanently. You have no choice but to scroll back to the top of the page to change your query. Google says this is by design; they want you to use instant search, so you can just hit backspace and edit your search query string from anywhere on the page. But half the time I can't remember exactly what I typed, so

MS is making inroads through partnerships, interesting presentation of search results(like video searches), and putting using Bing as the default in their OS (just like they did with IE). However, I still get better results with Google over Bing even when looking for stuff on microsoft.com. It really becomes frustrating when you are on a MS site and can't find something (that you know exists) because the site's search tool is powered by Bing. Yes, Google needs competition but Bing isn't it. Sad for MS but true.

At this point there won't be anyone else than can compete with Google either. Now a days search engines rely heavily on datamining and especially keyword data supplied by users when searching. It's also the reason why Google datamines so much. With their market share they get significantly more data than Bing, especially long tail keywords and keywords people search less often.

Google also relies on looking which result users choose and if they return back from that site. If user chooses a particular search, it means the user thinks it's relevant and could be good. But if he quickly returns back from the site, it means he didn't find the information he was looking for from that results. That is also data that Google gets much more just because they have so much more users.

So all in all, if it wasn't for Microsoft, we would only have Google. No one else can compete with them at this point. Interestingly, Google is failing in Russia, China and South Korea where local companies got the market share before Google, and they can't really do much about it. Google tried to play dirty tricks in Russia by disabling the initial search engine choice dialog [posterous.com] and defaulting to Google instead of Yandex, but they were quickly called of it and had to stop that practice.

This. This is where Bing fails. It almost sucks as hard as the "Fast" search engine they push for companies and organizations' internal website search tool. My university (which partially spawned Fast, so they probably got a good deal) uses it, and it is utter crap. Going to google and using "$searchterm site:$myuniversity.com" consistently yields better results: more relevant, less duplicates, and often things that the Fast engine does not even find. I cannot believe that they continue to spend money on a

I think the only thing keeping Yahoo in the Search market are the various software packages that try to push the Yahoo Toolbar during install, and ISPs that use it as the their default Homepage during setup.

I think the only thing keeping Yahoo in the Search market are the various software packages that try to push the Yahoo Toolbar during install, and ISPs that use it as the their default Homepage during setup.

Google is changing that though, as they're been heavily pushing Chrome with software installs, OEM's and ISPs. So instead of Yahoo toolbar or Bonzi Buddy, you now get Chrome when you install some software. How delightful.

I'm on file as a sony hater, these days. I boycott sony for many reasons.

but in my youth, when walkmans first came out they were *excellent* machines. well built, good design, good sound, reliable mechanism. the non-sony clones usually sucked and it took 5-10 years before the others learned how to make phones and cassette 'drives' that small be hi-fi and reliable.

sony is crap now. at least their consumer divisions are (sony pro audio and video is entirely different, but we never touch tho

So, how much of this swing away from Google is due to the seriously annoying things they have done recently including, but not limited to, Google Instant (seriously annoying), Google Preview (irritating and annoying) and screwing over the gmail interface.

As for the third, in this day and age there is no excuse.

As for the first two... I use other search engines in places where I can't disable google instant and google preview. I find both of them so annoying that I waste more time disabling them than actually using the search engine. The interface gets in the way of the function. Yes, there are ways to ignore and bypass these irritations.. but why I am wasting effect on doing so?

here here. and i suspect that plus integrated search results will only pollute what i am looking for.

I've been using bing more often simply due to mistrust of google and its honestly not THAT bad. I think its necessary to give the competition a chance, if only to keep google on their toes. Not that I like to support microsoft, but they're currently the only competitor in a position to keep Google honest.

And using an inferior product just so the superior product has competetion doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Microsoft has historically only competed when they've been forced to; look at the clucterfuck IE was after Netscape died. It never got any better until Mozilla and Opera. If they can get users even with an inferior product, why would they be compelled to improve that product? MS had search long before Google, ba

So, how much of this swing away from Google is due to the seriously annoying things

My off-hand guess is that it's approximately 0%. I'd bet most of the reason people are moving to Bing is that people have bought new computers with Windows 7, and Bing is the default search. Also, Microsoft changed the selector to set a different search engine provider, and it's ultimately a bigger pain in the butt to change providers.

I take your opinion on board.. but it doesn't match my current experience with gmail. I have reverted to the old interface 4 times now. Every time I have submitted a report with issues with the new interface.

So... you don't find the new interface to be an eye strain?No issues with the new message layout?The themes are not screwed up for you? (I am going to miss the ocean theme)You don't find having a huge red button blaring at you annoying?You like icons with no labels? You don't find yourself subconsciousl

I use '1' and '2' in Opera to move between tabs, and Google's interface keeps taking focus and putting whatever I type in the search box, even if I removed focus from it. I disabled javascript for google. Their interface is really irritating, and thankfully I can use the 'g' shortcut in the address bar of Opera to search, and don't go through Google's page directly.

Yes. This.I should have included a mention of the removal of + with the replacement of " " - it drives me nuts.

Although, I am finding their 'natural language search' "feature" to be more irritating. You search for key words including 'website' and it returns results including 'web' and 'site'.. but I know I am looking for "website".

Also, I've found that dissimilar searches.. are returning very similar search results. It is like google has cached the original search.. and is now throwing half of the origina

I doubt even MS can keep this up - they have to buy vast quantities of their traffic. Whilst there's probably a bit more left in the budget (which of course they hope will take them to the tipping point where it becomes self-sustaining), if they aren't careful, they'll run out of money and be back on the decline.

No one chooses Bing (ok some do but not many). People use Bing because their WindowsUpdate updated their browser from IEx to IEy and it changed the default search engine to Bing and the user never even noticed. I say this because, as an IT professional, every single user's PC I have ever seen with Bing as the default search engine, the user still thinks they're using Google. They simply don't pay attention to anything that's going on in front of their own eyes.

Bing is not gaining market share by being good - it's gaining it because MS is using their OS monopoly to "trick" users into using Bing. I say this as someone who generally likes Microsoft, too. When it comes to someone changing my browsers settings - any of them - without asking me, I get really pissed off.

I know people who use Bing because google search results, for the queries they do, are so flooded with spammer sites as to be useless.

For example if I search for "ipad 3 release date" on google most of the sites are clearly spammer sites designed to catch that particular query. On Bing only two of the results are those sites and the rest are from actual tech coverage of the question.

That's not correct. If you update from IE8 to IE9, Bing does become the default search engine for IE. Many users, smaller business, home users, etc, just use IE. IE share may be declining but it's far from insignificant. So if many users are switching from IE8 to 9 as their Windows automatically installs it, or as they get a new PC and it comes with Bing by default (which it does), then Bing gets an "artificial" boost.
Many of the people I have seen using Bing still think it's Google. They have no idea the

Considering that people search for Bing on Google, yes, people do choose to use Bing. It's not a small number - there's close 10 million searches per month for Bing related queries on Google alone.

You can check search query data here [slashdot.org]. Remember to change to [exact] search on match types so that it shows real search amount for specific queries.

[bing] 7,480,000...

I wonder how many people search for [google] using Bing. Does Bing have a similarly useful way to see their search data? I had a quick look but couldn't find anything (and the one thing I did find was their top searches, which didn't include numbers).

I wonder if Bing's increasing market share is due in any way to their increasingly maddening lock-up of IE's search behaviour in Windows 7.
I helped my father-in-law get a new Dell machine up and running over the Christmas break and was seriously astonished at how many steps are required now to make Google the default search agent in IE rather than Bing. A novice user has effectively no chance to avoid using Bing.
I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been more backlash against it, but I guess this shit is less

Clearly as the same search back end is being used by both bing and yahoo it has nothing to do with the search results.
Back in the 90s I stopped using yahoo. There were a few reason and one was the main search page was cluttered an ugly and googles was not. I think this is still true. Bing's growth probably has a lot to do with being the default search in MS products and the yahoo search page looking like it came from1996 doesn't help matters. That yahoo logo is a piece of junk that looks like it was made

And, to compete against Bing, "lots of work to do" means to create an OS running on the vast majority of the world's workstations, bundle a web browser that's used by default and "can't be removed from the operating system" and make their search engine the default in the search box or if you make a typo in the address bar.

Make no mistake, I'm not fan of Yahoo but the rise of Bing is certainly not due to the quality of its search results, real or imagined.

Does this really have anything to do with the quality of Bing search results and people choosing it or, as I suspect, is this just a side effect of Bing being the default search engine in Internet Explorer?I've also noticed that it's harder than it used to be to change IE over to Google as the default search engine.

After long ago abandoning Alta Vista for Google, I've recently found myself compelled to return, for one simple reason; Google try too hard to tell me what I'm looking for.

What I mean is this, Google are not content to let me tell them what I want to find. Their search algorithms now completely discount my use of quotation marks to group words, or to try to indicate that I really want whatever unlikely word I enter. Many of the old tricks for hinting to the search engine that you mean what you say are now

I upgraded my wifes vista laptop to IE9, the only download for I was a Bing/MSN branded one. Her homepage got changed to msn.com. The search box on msn.com is bing (obviously). Before the upgrade it had explicitly been set to yahoo

With all the recent G+ shenanigans [searchengineland.com] I'm going to change my browser's default search to Bing for a week and see how it goes. I'll add a link-bar shortcut to Google in case I'm not happy with any particular search, but I have the "go to the search box" keyboard shortcut so totally ingrained in my muscle memory that it'll take conscious effort to use Google.

I'm not saying I'll quit Google forever, because what if MS does something sleazy soon, but competition is supposed to make things better for all of us, so

Yeah, that's not paranoid at all. There's a much higher change that users would change to Google instead of Bing, and since Microsoft gets paid for the Yahoo deal, why would they deliberately shoot themselves in to leg?

Since you've been moderated "troll" by an obviously paid Microsoft shill, I'll let them waste some more mod points modding me down, too. You said "So, a shitty useless search engine overtakes a lame search engine. No wonder Yahoo is so useless it uses Bing." I agree completely.

The only person I know who uses Yahhoo is my 83 year old mother. I don't know anyone who uses Bing, for obvious reasons (it's second rate crapware).

I'd say they're just fanboys, and modding someone down for not liking Linux is as bad as modding someone down for not liking Windows, unless it's just retarded (like "You Windows lusers don't even have a CLI" when in fact it's always had a CLI available).

It's possible that RedHat does employ shills; I have no clue. But some of the marketspeak comments about Windows (and other software companies as well) are obviously shills. Or maybe not, maybe they're just fools who swallow that marketspeak they saw elsewh

Here's another reason - they played a snippet from SNL on the radio this morning, a Jimmy Fallon parody of David Bowie, "Tebowie". It was funny so I googled for an mp3 of it; there were videos but no MP3. So I search from BitTorrent, and a Bing page comes up, with few of the results having anything to do with Fallon, Bowie, or Tebow. No MP3s and no Tebowie at all.

I'm starting to believe that nobody uses Bing on purpose. The only way anybody gets there is from companies MS has paid. It's disgusting.